Specify compiler for C packages.

[vbabiy]

There should be a command line option to select a compiler or the program should be intelligent about what compiler it should try to use. Notably on Windows the default is MSVC which many people won't have.

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• Bitbucket: https://bitbucket.org/ianb/pip/issue/149
• Originally Reported By: Anonymous
• Originally Created At: 2010-07-26 14:50:39

[vbabiy]

I think this is generally controlled by an environmental variable (CC?). I
don't think pip can generally handle that. I can't really think of anything
pip can do here.

The one thing I would be open to is detecting the error and translating it
into a more friendly/useful error message. We can't do that for every compile
problem (e.g., missing libraries or headers usually turn into impossibly
horrible error messages) but for some select cases it would be okay. Windows
compiler errors might be one. Not having Python.h installed would be another
common problem that usually has an ugly error message.

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Original Comment By: Ian Bicking

[pnasrat]

Issue #18 duplicates this, but has more comments, closing this as dupe.